


Da mi basia mille, deinde centum

by anactoriatalksback



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: And third kiss, Asphyxiation, First Kiss, Frottage, Look there's a lot of kissing in this one, M/M, Of a mild variety, Post-Canon Fix-It, Sloppy Makeouts, and second kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:27:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25072360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoriatalksback/pseuds/anactoriatalksback
Summary: Francis Crozier has never seen the point of kissing. Enter James Fitzjames.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 41
Kudos: 127





	Da mi basia mille, deinde centum

Francis Crozier has never seen the point of kissing.

If a declaration of intent, then surely it is unnecessary. An overture – many overtures – must surely have been made, and at least one[1] accepted, in order to reach any territory where a kiss is remotely conceivable.

Is a kiss a chart of a voyage? This is how I kiss, this then is how you may expect me to touch you, here, and here, and – if you let me – here. If so, a kiss is at best unreliable. Crozier knows – who better – that a map can lie to you, out of ignorance or hubris or blinkered optimism or a desire to please. He knows too that the best map in the world is completely without value in the hands of an untutored sailor.

No, a kiss has no value as a herald, or a signal, or of any particular thing. Crozier understands that a kiss is expected, in the same way that he knows to tell a lady that she is looking well. The pleasantry is meaningless and only noticed in the breach, not in the observance.

Crozier even understands, dimly, that some people take pleasure in kissing: in the same way, he supposes, that some people delight in receiving a compliment, and others rejoice in fashioning a well-turned bit of flummery.

For Crozier, a kiss is a toll to be paid, hurriedly and perfunctorily, a salute pressed to a pair of lips or to a cool scented cheek before he is sent home. A kiss is the price of admittance, one he dutifully pays while waiting to see if he is to be permitted to step across the threshold.

Better to get it over with, he thinks. Better yet if he can throw it overboard. Crozier is a sailor and he knows the importance of ballast.

So when Crozier kisses Fitzjames, he is rather hoping on later occasions to dispense with the pleasantries. Fitzjames, he thinks, is a seasoned sailor by now. Surely he understands the importance of taking only the essentials with you, on any arduous journey. And my God, what is loving if not an arduous journey undertaken on foot with incomplete maps and inadequate provisions?

Fitzjames agrees about the essentials. He does not, however, agree on what _qualifies_ as `essential’.

When Crozier presses a brief, hard kiss to Fitzjames’s narrow mouth, he thinks _There. That’s one station of the Cross done with_. _Onwards._ His hands are kneading roughly at Fitzjames’s high fundament and he is shoving his own hips forward in a brisk motion, when Fitzjames’s hand shoots out. He grips his chin and raises it firmly, lifting Crozier’s lips to his own before his head descends.

 _Of course_ , thinks Crozier in resignation and a dim impatience. Of course Fitzjames insists on the niceties. Fitzjames is sitting, with the proper silverware. Fitzjames wishes to move, mannerly and sedate, through all the proper points on the pilgrimage. Very well. Crozier is accustomed to waiting for the beautiful, damp-palmed in antechambers, until he is suffered to enter.

So Crozier allows his head to be guided, lets Fitzjames’s head descend.

What he has failed to take into account, however, is that he has never been kissed.

Oh, he has kissed before, and been allowed to kiss. Sometimes he has been allowed to do more.

It is quite a different matter, Crozier finds, to _be_ kissed.

To _be_ kissed, for example, means that another hand curves around his jaw, another set of trembling fingers rests on his cheek. Another mouth presses, softly, against his own. Another voice sighs when his lips part. Another tongue runs over his bottom lip, and another pair of arms tightens around him as he shivers.

To be kissed means that another set of fingertips traces over his lips – a little swollen, now, and wet – when the two of them part, and another pair of eyes looks wonderingly at him. Wonderingly and with the beginnings of a shy gratitude that Crozier thinks he can recognise. He knows the shape of the feeling, knows it well, but has never considered that one day it might be directed at him.

It looks better on Fitzjames. Crozier thinks, with surprisingly little rancour, that everything does.

He clears his throat. ‘Well, now,’ he says, ‘now that that’s done with - ’

He reaches again for Fitzjames, notices that his hands are trembling, and hopes that Fitzjames doesn’t see, when Fitzjames takes his face in his hands again.

‘Francis,’ he says. ‘one will not suffice me, I’m afraid.’

This is getting absurd. Crozier knows Fitzjames’s tale now. The man’s a climber and a striver, as is Crozier, though of a very different type. He has no business at all behaving as though he’s a creature of plenty, or – worse – to the manner born of plenty.

‘James,’ says Crozier.

‘Let me,’ says Fitzjames, urgent and earnest. ‘Francis, I – I have thought about this.’

Crozier can sense the precise moment that his heart stops, and the ungraceful bound it makes when it starts again. Carefully he says ‘About this?’

 _About this?_ he says. He does not say _About me?_

‘About you,’ says Fitzjames, and Crozier wonders if he spoke aloud after all. ‘I never thought I would find out, not in the sphere of … practical politics, but I … wondered. About what it might be.’ He swallows, and Crozier watches the movement of the long elegant throat he has looked at for so long and with such pained exactitude and is only now beginning to understand why. ‘Did you … did you ever wonder? About me?’

Crozier looks up at him. He is staring at Crozier with his chin lifted. There is the merest thread of archness in the question, as though Fitzjames was sending it out of the door naked and then remembered, belatedly, to throw on a hastily-stitched mantle of coquetry.

Crozier shakes his head.

‘Oh,’ says Fitzjames. His shoulders fall and he squares them instantly. ‘No, no, I suppose - ’

‘I didn’t,’ says Crozier, ‘because I didn’t know I _could_.’

Crozier has amassed a body of certain knowledge over the years. The first thing he has learned is that he will get nothing without asking for it, repeatedly if need be. The second is that asking for a thing (repeatedly if need be) is no guarantee that it will be promised to you. The third is that a promise is not a certainty. The fourth is that there is neither pleasure nor honour in courting disappointment out of season.

Crozier husbands his hope. He has little enough of it, and hard use has made it crabbed and fragile. Why throw his cap over more windmills than he can help?

Hard to explain this to Fitzjames, a creature composed solely of audacity and overreach.

He says ‘I am careful what I ask for, James. Even in my own soul.’

Fitzjames, it is clear, does not well understand this, and Crozier decides that he does not need to. He leans up and kisses him instead. He swallows Fitzjames’s gasp into his own mouth, goes willingly when Fitzjames’s fingers slide into his hair and tug him into place. He kisses and is kissed, and it is very strange and very wonderful.

They part again, Fitzjames’s breath coming in hot quick pants against Crozier’s lips. Crozier finds his own tongue darting out, as if he can taste Fitzjames’s breath in the air.

Crozier finds that he wants, urgently, to hear Fitzjames’s voice. What a difference three years make. ‘What,’ says Crozier, and his lips twist at how cracked and pleading his own voice is, ‘What did you imagine?’

Fitzjames blinks at him, and Crozier allows himself a moment of silent satisfaction. ‘You said you’d thought of kissing me,’ he says before cocking an eyebrow at Fitzjames. ‘What did you imagine?’

Fitzjames smiles slowly, and Crozier watches the creases in his cheeks deepen. ‘After dinner,’ he says, ‘in your wardroom, or – by some mysterious dispensation of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier – when you deigned to make an appearance on _Erebus_ , I’d lie in my cabin. I’d see … shapes … when I closed my eyes.’

‘James,’ says Crozier, ‘Not everything needs to be a grand saga.’

‘You asked,’ says Fitzjames, ‘now attend. I’d see shapes in my mind’s eye, and I tried – oh, I tried mightily, Francis, tried for months – to pretend I didn’t know what those shapes were. But the nights are long in the Arctic - ’

‘Yes, I know, James, I was _there_ \- ’

‘ _The nights are long in the Arctic_ , as I was saying, and I found my will to pretend slowly slipping away. And when it did – when I could not force my eyes shut any longer – I was compelled to recognise the shapes.’

He pauses and looks significantly at Crozier, who says ‘James, what in our acquaintance makes you think I’m minded to play this game?’

Fitzjames makes a _moue_ of dissatisfaction and Crozier finds himself grinning back at him like a mooncalf[2]. ‘You’re a curmudgeon.’

‘I am,’ allows Crozier, ‘and I’m losing what little patience I had, so now. Having brought yourself to recognise your mysterious shapes, what were they and what have they to do with me?’

Fitzjames gathers Crozier closer, and lowers his head so his lips brush Crozier’s ear. ‘The shapes,’ he says, and Crozier’s eyes shut at the rumble of that familiar baritone against his chest, ‘were the shapes your mouth made.’

‘Christ,’ says Crozier.

‘This curl of the lip,’ continues Fitzjames, ‘this sneer, this peevish little twist, this bad-tempered lower, this poisonous little smile. I knew them all, I hoarded them, Francis, one by one.’

‘Strange beasts,’ says Crozier, trying for a smile and giving up immediately, ‘for a strange collector.’

He feels Fitzjames shrug. ‘They were all I had from you. I wanted them all, such as they were, anything I could get from you.’

‘James,’ says Crozier, helpless, because he should have known, Fitzjames has the habit of unmanning him by revealing himself, and Crozier should have learned to anticipate it by now, should have a defence against it, but he never has.

‘I used to touch my lips,’ says Fitzjames, ‘like this’, and raises his long fingers to Crozier’s mouth. He traces the shape of Crozier’s lips delicately, learning the shape. Crozier wonders distantly how he ought to feel about the sensitive fingers handling him like something fragile and skittish, a thoroughbred foal made of glass.

‘I used to try to pull my mouth into the shapes you made,’ says Fitzjames.

‘They’d look better on you,’ says Crozier, as emphatically as he can contrive against the pad of Fitzjames’s fingers.

‘I could never quite manage the thing,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I never had quite your trick of contempt, I think.’

Now there Crozier must take issue. ‘I think you had a mighty sword arm in contempt, James,’ he says, ‘I would know, trust me.’

The fingers have returned, but are no longer delicate. They clamp themselves firmly across Crozier’s mouth and Fitzjames says ‘You misread me, then.’

Crozier lifts an eyebrow.

‘I didn’t,’ says Fitzjames, ‘or – I tried, I think. I _wanted_ to despise you.’

Crozier nods.

‘I wanted,’ says Fitzjames, and his voice turns inward, lower, darker, ‘I wanted to shake you.’

The hand over Crozier’s mouth slackens its hold enough to stroke, absently, at Crozier’s cheek and jaw. Fitzjames continues ‘I wondered what other shapes your mouth could make. I wondered when you might make them.’

‘I touched my mouth like this,’ says Fitzjames, and the fingers against Crozier’s mouth are rougher now, ‘and I wondered what shape your mouth might make against mine.’

‘Jaysus.’

‘I used to touch my neck,’ says Fitzjames, and rests his own hand against his neck. Crozier growls and smacks Fitzjames’s hand away, grasping the back of Fitzjames’s throat and watching his own thumb stroke against the sharp rise of his Adam’s apple.

‘I wanted to wring your neck sometimes,’ he hears himself saying, his voice scraping against Fitzjames’s skin.

Fitzjames swallows and Crozier can feel it under his thumb. ‘I know.’

‘I thought,’ says Crozier, ‘I thought that’s what I wanted.’

‘And now?’

Crozier raises his eyes to Fitzjames’s. ‘What else did you do?’

And Crozier knows he’s capable of greed, he knows it, he suffers it and occasionally employs it, but by Saint Patrick and all the snakes he chased out of Ireland, never has he felt like this before. He wants everything that Fitzjames is so carelessly throwing to him, wants to attach his lips to his long white throat and suck out every wonderful, terrifying word, now in this moment where they are pretending that Crozier is a man these words can be said to.

Fitzjames’s eyes are very dark. His tongue darts out to wet his own lips and Crozier watches the movement. ‘What do you want now?’

Crozier can feel the stretch of the delicate tendons under his thumb as Fitzjames lifts his chin again. There’s the slightest note of a plea in his voice. Fitzjames wants something too. He wants something _from Crozier_ , and Crozier …

Crozier tightens his fingers on the back of Fitzjames’s neck and draws him closer, until Crozier can run his nose up the length of his neck. White and pink and gold in the firelight. The faintest sheen of sweat, despite the gathering autumnal chill.

He opens his mouth against the soft flesh where Fitzjames’s neck meets his jaw. Tastes the skin there, the slight salt of his sweat. Lets his teeth graze the skin. Feels, rather than hears, Fitzjames’s gasp.

Crozier feels Fitzjames’s hand circling his wrist. His fingers creep up until they cover the back of Crozier’s thumb, resting atop his Adam’s apple. He moves Crozier’s thumb down, creeping over the slope of his throat, until they reach the place just over his shoulders, where there is a hot, unbearably vulnerable well. Crozier has never thought about it – never _allowed_ himself to think about it – except to look at the same place on his body with a renewed and irritated fascination.

And now here it is, fine skin stretched over a warm, slightly damp hollow, and Fitzjames’s fingers pressing insistently on Crozier’s thumb. Holding his thumb down. Hold it down where it will – it certainly will –

‘I used to imagine,’ says Fitzjames, ‘the shapes of the marks you might leave on me.’

Crozier can hear the vibrations of his voice under his thumb, his fingers, his mouth. If he were a fanciful man[3], he might imagine he could put together the precise taste of it. Bottle it and take it with him in a hip-flask. Uncork him – sparingly, to revive himself in moments of direst need.

He licks the skin under his mouth. Absorbs Fizjames’s shiver. Presses down warningly with his thumb and nips at the skin. Fitzjames groans, or Crozier does.

‘Like that?,’ says Crozier, pulling away just far enough to say the words to Fitzjames’s throat.

Fitzjames swallows, and Crozier can feel the leap under his thumb. ‘I used to – if I were feeling brave, I’d imagine leaving m-marks higher. Where – where all could see.’

Oh, Crozier can oblige. He sinks his teeth into the skin beneath Fitzjames’s jaw, tightening his grasp around his throat as he starts. He sucks: softly, at first, then ferociously, spurred on by Fitzjames’s breathy moans and long fingers in his hair, holding him fast.

‘I imagined,’ says Fitzjames, rushed and urgent, ‘I imagined – oh, Francis, - I imagined I might – might get questions. I imagined – oh – brave purple welts, the – there, yes, yes – def – nggghhhh – definite imprints of teeth.’

Crozier nips him ungently. Licks over the hurt – a flat wet sweep – and applies himself again.

‘I thought,’ says Fitzjames, and Crozier can hear it, the unmistakeable lilt, the dinner-table lilt, ‘I imagined the excuses I’d have to manufacture. The – pretexts.’

Crozier worries the thin flesh under his teeth one last time and lifts his head, moving his thumb to press into the mark he’s made. ‘I ought to have known your most intimate reveries would still involve an audience and a story.’

Fitzjames gazes at Crozier. ‘They weren’t for my benefit.’

‘They never are, James,’ says Crozier, and my God, he did not know his voice could carry that freight of fondness.

‘I meant,’ says Fitzjames, ‘that you would want – I thought you would want it not to be known. Our … connection.’

Crozier stares at Fitzjames. ‘You thought I – _I_ – would not wish to own _you_? Even in – even in –’

‘Bar sinister,’ says Fitzjames, with an inward smile that makes Crozier want to scream, ‘a half-breed and a sodomite to boot. I’m not a creature for daylight, Francis.’

‘Stop it,’ says Crozier, tasting metal in his mouth. ‘Stop it, I will not have it, do you hear me? I will not.’

‘In any case,’ says Fitzjames, ‘that’s hardly imp - ’

Crozier has Fitzjames’s face in his hands. ‘There’s not a man breathing under the sun,’ he says, ‘would not be proud to own you.’

‘Francis - ’

‘I’ll mark you,’ says Crozier, ‘a daisy chain of them, I’ll give you new ones and refresh the old, I’ll walk out with you in a gale only to have you on my arm, Christ alive, man, if you’d be seen with me, James, where wouldn’t I be seen with you.’

Fitzjames is staring at him, breath coming very fast. He looks thunderstruck, and Crozier is willing to admit that he wears it well.

He licks his lips. ‘I ought to have known,’ he says, ‘that an Irishman would blarney me.’

Crozier winces. ‘Hell’s Teeth, James,’ he says, ‘what will you take to never say that word again?’

‘Which word?’ says Fitzjames, opening his eyes very wide in a truly grotesque[4] approximation of innocence.

‘Blarney,’ says Crozier, articulating clearly and watching Fitzjames’s eyelashes flutter. ‘I have no gift for it, James, and if I ever acquire it, I promise not to use it on you.’

‘A loverlike promise,’ says Fitzjames, but he’s smiling. ‘As to what I’ll take to never say the word again …’ he gives Crozier a long, considering look before winding his arms about his waist, ‘a kiss?’

‘One kiss?’

‘One kiss for every occasion I shall have want of the word and find my tongue tied because of a promise made to you in a moment of weakness.’

‘Tongue-tied,’ says Francis, ‘should that day ever happen, that’s what they ought to knight me for.’

‘Well?’

Crozier lifts an eyebrow. ‘You drive a hard bargain,’ he says, ‘but very well.’

‘Excellent,’ says Fitzjames, ‘in that case, I shall take payment now.’

Crozier takes a moment to respond, because the minx is sliding his hand down below Crozier’s waist, but when the words sink in, his head snaps up. ‘That wasn’t in the agreement.’

‘It was,’ says Fitzjames, splaying his hand against the swell of Crozier’s arse, ‘you didn’t ask.’

‘You didn’t – ah, Christ, James – you didn’t specify.’

Fitzjames shrugs. ‘After our experiences,’ he says, giving Crozier’s rear a long squeeze, ‘I think I know to ask for payment on account.’

‘James – God, James – that isn’t - ’

‘Let me,’ says Fitzjames, his lips a bare inch from Crozier’s, ‘Francis, let me.’

Crozier finds his eyes shutting. ‘Very – very well,’ he says, ‘do your worst.’

Fitzjames chuckles, a rich warm sound against Crozier’s lips.

Crozier has occasion to add to his store of certain knowledge over the next few minutes.

The first is that in this, as in everything else, Fitzjames’s response to privation is a very different beast from Crozier’s.

Crozier is an eleventh child, wolfing down pancakes on Shrove Tuesday with an eye over his shoulder lest the plate be taken away. When a door opens, he has his foot out to make sure it’s not slammed shut. Crozier is a snatcher, a gobbler, a guzzler. He eats with his hands, hurriedly, and fills his pockets with as much bread as he thinks he can carry. He is looking to fill his belly, or if not that – never that, never really that – to stave off the roil and gnaw and pangs for as long as he can. His is not a constitution that is built to dwell, or linger, or roll a thing around his tongue. There’s no harbour safe enough for that.

Fitzjames, on the other hand? Fitzjames, as Crozier has had occasion to remark, well, Fitzjames tells a story. Every kiss, every bite and sigh and murmur is an occasion, a reward, whose marrow is to be sucked and savoured and remembered. Fitzjames is a man who has fashioned with careful hand every comfort in his life, and knows precisely how they are best to be enjoyed.

So there is an unhurried, lush violence to the way Fitzjames takes Crozier’s lower lip between his teeth. He leaves careful indents and runs his own tongue over his teeth as if to confirm the taste. He runs the tip of his sharp nose along the seam of Crozier’s lips and purrs in satisfaction. There is a wealth of aforethought in the way his tongue snakes into Crozier’s mouth, a nimble slippery thing moving with a confident purpose. There is a luxuriance in the way he sips at Crozier’s upper lip, the way he sucks Crozier’s tongue into his mouth. There is a proprietary care in the way his fingers cup Crozier’s jaw, even in the wet, open-mouthed kisses he leaves there, opulent and sharp with a hint of teeth.

Another thing that Crozier learns, and that surprises him precisely not at all, is that Fitzjames is impossible to silence even while kissing.

He sighs into Crozier’s mouth. He hums against his lips as he traces his cheeks with his fingers. His tongue pants against Crozier’s. He gasps when Crozier slips his hand beneath his guernsey to trace the skin of his back. He moans when Crozier bites his lip. He hisses when Crozier winds his fingers in his hair to pull his head back.

Fitzjames is also never still. His long fingers are constantly roving along Crozier’s cheeks, in his hair, along his flanks, spreading wide and possessive over his rump. Fitzjames shivers and trembles. He arches and sways over Crozier like a sapling or a willow, supple and tensile and surprisingly strong.

All these things help Crozier to add swiftly to a very specific cache of knowledge. He learns that Fitzjames likes to be bitten. He murmurs sweetly enough when Crozier presses light kisses along his cheekbones and mouth, but his high harsh sounds grow urgent when Crozier’s teeth fasten on his lip. He hums complaisantly when his hair is petted, but his moan is cracked and exultant when Crozier tugs. He keens when Crozier digs his nails into his scalp, or the skin of his back. His hips push forward, insistent, when Crozier’s thumb presses down on the hollow in his throat.

Crozier also learns some things about himself, an alarming development in a man of his years and (at least on dry land) settled habits.

Crozier learns that his heart seizes when their lips part and he finds Fitzjames’s eyes on him. He learns that when Fitzjames is staring at his mouth with an assessing glance, his throat dries. He learns that when Fitzjames leans down and licks a broad, flat swipe across his lips, he cannot look away from that long pink tongue. He learns that when Fitzjames’s eyes flutter shut as he noses at the crook of his neck, he feels violent, and violently protective, and violent again.

He learns that Fitzjames can pry a whimper from him when his teeth close over Crozier’s ear – a startled sound that Crozier thinks he ought to find humiliating. He learns a new hot exultation when Fitzjames pants into his mouth. He learns that he likes Fitzjames to nibble at his lower lip, and that he wants to drink up the sharp, purposeful inhale that he makes before diving into Crozier’s mouth. He learns that he trembles like an aspen when Fitzjames licks along the outside of his ear. He learns that he grabs involuntarily at Fitzjmes’s waist when he sucks his tongue. He learns that in the long, airless moments where he is learning Fitzjames’s mouth and being learned in return, he emerges light-headed and aching. He learns that he can do without breathing for long, long periods, and fully intends to extend those periods as much as he is able.

He learns that Fitzjames turns liquid when Crozier presses him down upon the sopha, arms winding about him and thighs cradling him softly. Then, when Crozier drags his lips and teeth over Fitzjames’s throat, a restless tossing current, all hot sighs and trembling fingers and bony squirming hips.

He learns that he can lean his forehead against Fitzjames’s to urge his head back and bare his throat to Crozier’s fingers and teeth. He learns that he can bite and lick at the corners of Fitzjames’s lips and he opens to him. He learns that probing inside Fitzjames’s wet, seeking mouth is like invading a country, lush and inviting and terrifying all at once. He learns that he can make Fitzjames whine if he lifts his hand from his throat, and keen if he presses down with his thumb at the same time that he grinds down on his prick.

At the present moment, he has Fitzjames’s mouth open, wide and wet, underneath his own, and a hand around his throat, a rhythmic pulsing squeeze. Beneath him Fitzjames’s hands are moving restlessly, one in his hair, the other down his back. He is arching his throat and back as best he is able under Crozier’s weight, nowhere near enough to buck him off, but seemingly relishing in being pinned. Crozier’s tongue is roving so far down Fitzjames’s gullet he thinks deliriously he might feel the shape of it through his skin if he squeezed just a little tighter. His hips are moving in concert with his thumb on Fitzjames’s throat, little circles dragging and pressing, meeting an answering surge from Fitzjames, whose legs are squeezing Crozier’s waist, one elegantly shod foot scraping down the rise of Crozier’s arse to the back of his knee.

Crozier is breathless and strainingly, achingly hard, swallowing Fitzjames’s desperate sounds into his mouth with starveling clamour. He didn’t know, he thinks, nobody ever told him he could know someone like this, that he could be allowed to find out, to crawl into another person and have them race out to meet you, come in, come in for God’s sake, stay awhile, make yourself known, make yourself at home, _failte, failte, cead mile failte._

He lifts his head to suck in air, with very poor grace, and Fitzjames has a hand snaking down beneath the waistband of his trousers. ‘Come on,’ he says, and Crozier groans at the rasp of his voice. ‘Francis.’

Fitzjames’s lips are swollen and shapeless as he pants, and there is spit pooling at the side of his mouth. Crozier’s, or his, or both.

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, an urgent breath. ‘Francis, please.’

‘One more,’ says Crozier, bending his head.

‘ _Francis_.’

‘You asked me for this,’ says Crozier, taking refuge in reasonableness. He does not feel reasonable at all. He grinds vindictively down upon Fitzjames and cocks an eyebrow at his long moan.

‘I – I did, but – _Christ_ , Francis – I didn’t, I – oh, _God_ – you weren’t - ’

‘I wasn’t,’ agrees Crozier, leaning his forehead against Fitzjames’s. Their hair is clinging to their scalps. ‘You did this to me.’

‘I – God above, Francis, please, I need - ’

Crozier bends his head over the shining well of spittle by Fitzjames’s mouth, and licks through it. He noses Fitzjames’s mouth open, then fits his mouth over and kisses it back into him. There’s a sound – a helpless little sound that Crozier marvels to think he already knows – and Fitzjames’s boot is digging painfully into Crozier’s arse as he rocks up into him, tongue licking Crozier’s and length hot and hard and leaking against him, through the worsted of his trousers.

When they part, Fitzjames says again ‘Francis.’

‘One more.’

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, imperatively, turning his head to evade Crozier’s descending lips. Crozier attaches himself to the long throat offered to him instead. ‘Francis, Francis, if you make me s-spend in my trousers, I’ll – oh, Christ – I’ll never forgive you.’

Crozier raises his head and bares his teeth. He lifts a thumb and smears it across Fitzjames’s lips. ‘You have other trousers,’ he says and bends his head.

[1] Francis Crozier only needs one ‘yes’. He has learned, through painstaking trial and humiliating error, to accept and to capitalise on whichever ‘yes’ he receives, because another is by no means guaranteed.

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[2] He thinks he should hate it, knows he should hate it, but finds that the will to resist has deserted him. Leached away, perhaps, by Fitzjames’s long nights in the Arctic.

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[3] And it transpires, to Crozier’s gathering horror, that in one very specific context, he might _be_ a fanciful man.

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[4] It might well be grotesque, but Crozier is incapable of finding it anything but charminga.

a Crozier is glumly becoming resigned to the certainty that any sober judgement he might ever have had is in tatters wherever Fitzjames is concerned.

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**Author's Note:**

> My Footnote Addiction, having been fed and watered by the Good Omens fandom, is now unfortunately your problem. I am so sorry.
> 
> My tumblr handle is [itsevidentvery](https://itsevidentvery.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to come yell with me there.
> 
> A handy-dandy rebloggable link for this fic is [here](https://itsevidentvery.tumblr.com/post/622733630576459776/da-mi-basia-mille-deinde-centum) if you are so inclined.


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